The present invention, in some embodiments thereof, relates to soft tissue segmentation of a medical image and, more particularly, but not exclusively, to segmentation of arteries and other organs located close to bones.
Analysis of soft tissues in medical images, such as blood vessels, airways, and organs such as the liver and spleen, can be difficult due to variability in the shape and location of the organs. Segmentation tools can provide meaningful 3-D views, automatic measurements, and data reformatting for better understanding of anatomy. However, prior art segmentation tools have generally required at least some manual user input, as described by Zhang et al, “3D Interactive Centerline Extraction,” Midas Journal id 583 (2009), and each image can require a lot of time by skilled professionals, making it impractical to routinely segment large numbers of medical images.
U.S. Pat. No. 6,754,376 to Turek, describes automatically segmenting a 3-D substructure, such as a coronary tree, starting with a manually chosen seed point.
US2007/0109299 to Peterson describes automatically finding the centerline of a tube-like object in a 3-D medical image.
Other prior art on segmentation of medical images is described in earlier patent applications assigned to Algotec, Ltd., including PCT/IL2004/001169, “Vessel Centerline Determination,” and US2007/0081702, “Method and System for Processing an Image of Body Tissue.”